Like Oliver Twist, we want more please. More?! Yeah, more fans. Brands are always on the hunt for more fans to pile onto their brand page and bellow out a devious Jabba the Hut chuckle with the number of fans that liked their page. In the grand scheme of things, does your brand need more fans?

With more and more fans piling onto your page, a great quantity of fans says a lot about your brand. “People like my brand!” This however may not be the case. According to a report on Mashable, only 6% of fans actually interact on a brand’s page. So while more may seem like a good idea, perhaps the bulking strategy is not the best idea.

A Napkin Labs report, according to Mashable, suggests, after analyzing 50 brand pages with 200,000 to 1 million fans each, that,

[H]aving more likes doesn’t necessarily mean having more engagement. In fact, the more Facebook fans a brand has, the lower the percentage of engaged fans tends to be. For example, brands with between 900,000 to 1 million fans had 60% less engagement than brands with 500,000-600,000 fans.

So what does a brand do with the fans that they have if they don’t take on more? How do you perform your social media marketing without losing your current fan base? Focus on the fans that engage. Napkin Labs calls them “superfans.” These “superfans” according to the report,

[T]he engagement of each one of a brand’s 20 most engaged fans is equal to that of 75 average fans. Each month, the so-called superfan likes 10 posts, shares five pieces of content and comments once. What’s more, these fans tend to get significantly more likes and comments on their posts than average fans, which helps drive up engagement on the brand’s page even more.

We give love to the ones that love us in return. This philosophy is no different when engaging your fan base. If your fans who post regularly are doing so without incentive, imagine what they could do with a free sample! So what does that mean to big brands? Show a little more love to the “superfan” and experiment with trying to engage with the fans you have before losing the ones you have in the pile of likes. Fans are not easy to come by. Make the best of what you have and more will soon follow.

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Jim Vacey is the Assistant Marketing Director for Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor NY. Jim is a graduate from Dowling College with a BA in English and History and looks to pursue an MBA in Creative Writing. Jim is now the proud father of his first child, Harley Quinn Vacey.